Penny looked at him, looked down at the shiny stuff-it was like thick cellophane, but a lot tougher-the Lizards had used to cover the dirt on which they’d set up the tent, then back at him again. In a low voice, she said, “Bet you wish now you would have laid me when you had the chance.”
He laughed, panted, laughed again. “You really want to know, I’ve been wishing that ever since the Lizards bombed Lamar. But look at me.” His left arm worked, more or less. He gestured with it. “Not much I can do about that now, so why worry about it?”
“No, you can’t, that’s so.” Penny’s eyes kindled. She knelt beside the government-issue cot on which he was lying and flipped back the blanket. “But I can.” She laughed as she took him in hand and bent over him. “If I hear anybody comin’, I’ll make like I was givin’ you the bedpan.”
He gasped when her mouth came down on him. He didn’t know whether he’d rise. He didn’t know whether he wanted to rise. Suddenly he understood how a woman had to feel when the guy she was with decided he was going to screw her then and there and she was too drunk to do anything about it.
Rise he did, in spite of everything. Penny’s head bobbed up and down. He gasped again, and then again. He wondered if he was going to have enough air in him to come, no matter how good it felt… and her lips and teasing tongue felt as good-well, almost as good-as getting shot up felt bad.
She closed her hand around his shaft, down below her busy mouth, and squeezed him, hard. Not more than two heartbeats later, he shuddered and exploded. For a moment, purple spots swam before his eyes. Then the inside of the tent filled with light, so clear and brilliant it seemed to be-
The Lizard fighter-bomber broke off its attack run and began to gain altitude. Omar Bradley scratched at the little bandage on his nose; he’d had a boil there lanced a couple of days before. “I’m glad we’re doing this with a radio signal to back up the wire,” he said. “Lay you seven to two the bombs and rockets broke the link.”
“My old man always told me never bet when I was liable to lose,” Leslie Groves answered. “No flies on him.”
“Not a one,” Bradley agreed. “You’ve got the buttons right there, General. One of them had better work. You want to do the honors and push them?”
“You bet I do,” Groves said. “I’ve been building these damn things for a hell of a long time now. About time I get to find out what they’re like when they go off.”
One of the ignition devices had an insulated wire coming out of it. The other one didn’t. Groves’ broad right thumb came down on one red button, his left on the other.
“Take that, you scaleless, egg-addled, stiff-jointed things!” Teerts cried as his rockets turned a stretch of Tosevite defenses into an oven where the meat would be diced and ground as it was roasted.
The Race’s landcruisers were snouting forward even as he bombarded the Big Uglies. The Tosevites had made a mistake this time-they’d made their attack with inadequate resources, and not shifted over to the defensive fast enough when they ran out of steam. The Race’s commanders, who’d learned alertness since coming to Tosev 3, were making them pay for it.
There wasn’t even much in the way of antiaircraft fire in this sector. The Big Uglies had probably had a lot of guns overrun when the Race’s counterattack went in. As Teerts began to climb back into the sky so he could return to the Kansas air base and rearm his killercraft, he decided he hadn’t had such an easy mission since the early days of the conquest, well before the Nipponese captured him.
Sudden impossible swelling glare made the nictitating membranes slide over his eyes in a futile effort to protect them. The killercraft spun and flipped and twisted in the air, violently unstable in all three axes. The controls would not answer, no matter what Teerts did.
“No!” he shouted. “Nottwice!” He stabbed a thumb toward the ejector button. The killercraft smashed into a hillside just before he reached it.
— real.
Penny Summers pulled back from him, gulping and choking a little, too. She took a long, deep breath, then said, “What the dickens do you suppose that is?”
“You mean you see it, too?” Auerbach said in his ruined voice. His heart was racing like a thoroughbred on Kentucky Derby day.
“Sure do.” Penny flipped the blanket up over him again. “Like somebody fired up a new sun right outside the tent.” She looked around. “Fading now, though.”
“Yeah.” The preternatural glow had lasted only a few seconds. When Auerbach first saw it, he’d wondered if it was a sign he was going to cash in his chips right then and there. It would have been a hell of a way to go, but he was glad he was still around. “What do you suppose it was?”
Before she answered, Penny scrubbed at her chin with a corner of the blanket. Then she said, “Couldn’t begin to guess. Probably some damn Lizard thing, though.”
“Yeah,” Auerbach said again. He cocked his head to one side. There was some sort of commotion out in the streets of the growing tent city of wounded. He heard Lizards calling and shouting to one another, sounding like nothing so much as boilers with bad seams. “Whatever it was, they’re sure excited about it.”
“Will you look at that?” Leslie Groves said softly, craning his neck back to look up and up and up at the cloud whose top, now spreading out like the canopy of an umbrella, towered far higher into the sky than any of the Rockies. He shook his head in awe and wonder. The Lizard fighter plane burning not far away, normally cause for a celebration, now wasn’t worth noticing. “Will you justlook at that?”
“I’d heard what they were like,” General Bradley answered. “I’ve been through the ruins of Washington, so I know what they can do. But I never imagined the blast itself. Until you’ve seen it-” He didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on.
“-and heard it,” Groves added. They were some miles back toward Denver: the one thing you didn’t want to be was too close to an atomic bomb when it went off. Even so, the roar of the blast had sounded like the end of the world, and the earth had jumped beneath Groves’ feet. Wind tore past, then quickly stilled.
“I hope we pulled all our men back far enough so the blast didn’t harm them,” Bradley said. “Hard to gauge that, when we don’t have enough experience with these weapons.”
“Yes, sir,” Groves said, and then, “Well, we’re learning more all the time, and I expect we’ll know quite a lot before this war is through.”
“I’m very much afraid you’re right, General,” Bradley said, scowling. “Now we have to see where and how the Lizards will reply. The price we’ve paid to stop this drive is a city given over to the fire. I pray it will prove a good bargain in the end.”
“So do I, sir,” Groves replied. “But if we don’t hold Denver, we can’t hang on to the rest of the U.S.A.”
“So I tell myself,” Bradley said. “It lets me fall asleep at night.” He paused. His features grew so grim and taut, Groves was easily able to imagine what he’d look like if he lived to eighty. “It lets me fall asleep,” he repeated, “but it doesn’t let me stay that way.”
Atvar had been used to getting bad news up in his chamber aboard the127th Emperor Hetto or in the bannership’s command center. Receiving it in this Tosevite room more or less adapted for the comfort of the Race was somehow harder. The furnishings and electronics were familiar. The design of the windows, the Tosevite cityscape he saw through them, the very size of the chamber-reminding him why the Race called TosevitesBig Uglies-all shouted at him that this was not his world, that he did not belong here.
“Outside Denver, is it?” he said dully, and stared at the damage estimates coming up on the computer screen. The numbers were still preliminary, but they didn’t look good. The Americans, fighting ferociously from prepared positions, had already taken a heavy toll on his males. And now, just when he thought his forces had achieved a breakthrough-“Exalted Fleetlord, they tricked us,” Kirel said. “They conducted an attack in that sector, but so clumsily that they used themselves up in the process, leaving inadequate force to hold the line there. When the local commander sought to exploit what he perceived as a blunder-”